Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Other advisors provided marketing with industry-specific advice in our initial vertical markets (computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, finite element analysis, and petroleum engineering). Our company’s stock was an inducement, but all of them were in it to help us build a better computer.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Posted on September 14, 2009 by steveblank Over the last 30 years Wall Street’s appetite for technology stocks have changed radically – swinging between unbridled enthusiasm to believing they’re all toxic. Your firm worked with an investment banking firm that underwrote and offered stock (typically on the NASDAQ exchange) to the public.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

They sold to a set of customers I knew nothing about. The company was the laughing stock of the Mac market. After talking to its resellers and customers I realized that SuperMac was the only company that could be described as “fifth in a group of three.” Why I was interested was equally obscure.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

As the conversation began to get down to how much stock and salary we could offer van Dam, we left the barber to finish his work and went to a payphone to call our CEO to confirm the deal. Forget the Hypertext idea and come on back to California. The response from across the country?

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Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. When Terman said no, Sylvania, a tube company which built proximity fuse tubes in WWII, won the contract and set up its Electronic Defense Lab (EDL) in Mountain View California in the middle of an orchard.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

It’s the decisions that you make that might cost you an order, a sale or a higher stock price. Just remember ethics and values are about what you practice when the going gets tough. Do the right thing. It pays off in the end.

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Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

My way of explaining our support and service role to the marketing department was that: Sales is the sharp end of the stick, and marketing at best, is the stick. But while the sales team works for commission, the rest of the employees have equity (stock) in the company. No one was confused after that. Who’s on the Sharp End?

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